Author Archives: Senior Researcher

Low-Intensity Pulsed Ultrasound LIPUS Does Not Increase Longitudinal Growth Of Bone

Update March 6th 2014: Tyler did leave a response to this post originally but there is now even more evidence found which tips the question of the effect of Low-Intensity Pulsed Ultrasound on bone longitudinal growth to the side of having no affect at all.

Study #1: Effects of therapeutic ultrasound on longitudinal growth of the femur and tibia in rats

The conclusion for this particular study was that using the three different intensities of LIPUS at 0.5, 1.0 W/cm^2, and 1.5 W/cm^2 it was found that the emissions had no effect. There was no inhibitory effect and there was no stimulatory effect. If we were to be extremely accurate, there was a very slight stimulatory effect in the first two groups and an inhibitory effect in the third group, but the slight deviations were too small to be considered significant.

There have been some studies like the Chapter 5 “Low-intensity ultrasound stimulates endochondral ossification in vitro” which shows that using LIPUS is critical when going through the beginning stages of endochondral ossification though.

This recent news is slightly sad to hear but this is one study I did find by Joseph Spadaro, who collaborated with Dr. Robert Becker about 30 years ago, which shows that the LIPUS technology which we had previously believed to work in increasing bone growth (at least density wise) seems to do very little towards the longitudinal growth of bones “Application of low-intensity ultrasound to growing bone in rats.”

Abstract Below

Low-intensity pulsed ultrasound recently has been shown to accelerate long bone fracture healing, but its effect on bone growth and development is unknown. The longitudinal growth and bone density of the femur and tibia in young rats was measured after application of an ultrasound transducer emitting 1.5-MHz pulsed ultrasound (30 mW/cm2, SATA) for 20 min/day. After 28 days, no length difference was detected (< or = 2%) compared to the sham-treated leg or to unexposed controls. Also, no significant difference in bone mineral density (BMD) of the femur or tibia was found (< or = 6%). In a repeated experiment in which a periosteal trauma stimulus was created in the femoral diaphysis, the ultrasound also had no effect on growth or BMD. This results suggests that physeal bone growth is far less sensitive to this level of ultrasound application than is fracture repair. This may be related to the cascade of cellular events and regulatory factors that are present after a fracture.

So what does this mean for us?

Recently I have been looking into the piezoelectric properties of the bone, as described by the book The Body Electric. Dr. Becker wrote that back in the 1975-1980 year range, he had found that from the arrangement of how the collagen fibers and apatite crystals are aligned next to each other, they created a PN Junction as well as being piezoelectric. The bones in our body are actually semi-conductors.

While the research group originally thought that the apatite, being a crystal, would be piezoelectric, it turned out that the large collagen fibers seemed to be the real compound.

The author of this paper was one of his colleagues, whom he collaborated extensively with. I’ve searched through the PubMed database to see what he has written in the decades that followed. This particular study done by the current professor emeritus of at SUNY suggest that even using young lab rats (which means that they have healthy growth plates available), the LIPUS technology of placing a transducer emitting Ultrasound at levels of 1.5-MHz pulsed ultrasound (30 mW/cm2, SATA) for 20 minutes every day.

If the transducer has no effect on young rats with clearly available cartilage to possibly stimulate, then it would most likely not have any effect on humans with no cartilage at all.

Note the following points made

There was no effect on longitudinal growth of the leg bones (femur and tibia) after 30 days
There was no effect on the bone mineral density of the same bones after 30 days.
When a load was tried on the diaphysis of the femur, there was no effect on the factors again

It seems that while LIPUS might work in somehow increasing the rate of bone non-union healing, it has almost no effect on bone physeal growth. It doesn’t even work on young lab rats.

At this point, I propose that we STOP going down this line of research, on the possibility of using the Low-Intensity Pulsed Ultrasound as a possible way to increase height, especially for adults with no cartilage to work with.

Tyler-I looked over this full study

“Four-week-old Sprague–Dawley male rats (approximately 90 g) were treated for 20 min/day with ultrasound applied to the left leg during four weeks, while the right leg served as internal control”

Experiment 2 is with periosteal abrasion.

Exposure time (days)	Treatment group	Experiment 1 (ultrasound only)					Experiment 2 (ultrasound + periosteal trauma)
Exposure time (days)	Treatment group	n	Left femur (treated)	Right femur (control)	Left tibia (treated)	Right tibia (control)	n	Left femur (treated)	Right femur (control)	Left tibia (treated)	Right tibia (control)
0	Active	6	22.00 ± 0.50	21.82 ± 0.39	25.80 ± 0.87	25.90 ± 0.79	6	19.24 ± 0.80	19.11 ± 0.81	26.75 ± 0.70	26.89 ± 0.79
	Sham	6	21.47 ± 0.45	21.93 ± 0.60	25.65 ± 0.47	26.13 ± 0.90	6	19.64 ± 0.23	19.89 ± 0.75	27.25 ± 0.79	27.20 ± 0.93
	Normal	4	22.32 ± 0.25	21.55 ± 0.89	24.29 ± 0.78	26.07 ± 0.92
14	Active	6	28.39 ± 0.71	28.55 ± 0.65	32.17 ± 0.47	32.35 ± 0.87	6	25.89 ± 0.70	26.36 ± 0.62	33.32 ± 0.62	33.49 ± 0.71
	Sham	6	27.91 ± 0.97	28.00 ± 0.60	31.64 ± 0.45	31.53 ± 0.62	6	26.77 ± 0.80	26.93 ± 1.09	34.14 ± 0.80	34.20 ± 0.17
	Normal	4	28.69 ± 0.47	28.52 ± 0.77	33.42 ± 1.53	32.84 ± 0.28
28	Active	6	31.25 ± 0.64	31.07 ± 0.64	35.36 ± 0.41	35.34 ± 0.69	6	27.58 ± 1.43	28.72 ± 1.33	36.82 ± 0.59	36.83 ± 0.58
	Sham	6	31.02 ± 0.67	31.18 ± 0.97	34.49 ± 0.72	34.45 ± 0.81	6	28.13 ± 1.68	27.87 ± 1.35	37.20 ± 1.11	37.17 ± 1.01
	Normal	4	32.16 ± 0.73	32.03 ± 0.41	36.03 ± 0.62	35.89 ± 0.40

In one study I mentioned on this post on ultrasound, Pulsed Wave Ultrasound on the metatarsal was able to increase longiudinal bone growth rate.

Looking at this study:

Effects of growth hormone and ultrasound on mandibular growth in rats: MicroCT and toxicity analyses.

“Mandibular growth can be enhanced by the systemic administration of recombinant growth hormone (rGH) and/or local application of therapeutic low intensity pulsed ultrasound (LIPUS). The purpose of this study was to determine if local injection of rGH and application of LIPUS to the temporomandibular joint (TMJ) would synergistically enhance mandibular growth. In an animal study, the effect of rGH, LIPUS, and combination of rGH and LIPUS on male Sprague-Dawley rats was observed. Mandibular growth was evaluated by measuring total hemimandibular and condylar bone volume and bone surface area as well as condylar bone mineral density (BMD) after 21 days on dissected rats’ mandibles using micro-computed tomography (MicroCT). The expression of c-jun mRNA extracted from the liver of each of these rats was also quantified by real-time polymerase chain reaction to evaluate possible systemic effect of local rGH administration. Significant growth stimulation was observed in the mandibular and condylar bone of the animals treated with rGH, LIPUS, and rGH/LIPUS combined when compared with the control group. Bone volume, surface area, condylar bone mineral density, and c-jun expression were also compared between the treatment groups and the control in the liver. The results suggest that mandibular growth may be enhanced by injection of rGH or LIPUS application. The current study although showed synergetic effect of rGH and LIPUS application in increasing mandibular condylar head length, there was no significant changes in mandibular bone volume using both treatments together when compared to the two individual treatments. Moreover, combined rGH and LIPUS decreased condylar bone mineral density than each treatment separately. Future research could be directed to investigate the effects of different rGH doses and/or different LIPUS exposures parameters on lower jaw growth. ”

Both LIPUS and HGH increased c-Jun expression but HGH did it to a far greater degree.

” 8-week-old male Sprague–Dawley rats weighing 200 g”

Mandibular Condyle seems to respond to different things than other bone types(like femur and tibia) respond to stimuli though. It’s been shown that LIPUS can affect stimuli involved in height growth like the growth plate directly and mesenchymal stem cells. Maybe just specific application of LIPUS is needed. Different frequencies for example could be required to induce longitudinal bone growth.

Update #11 – Decalcification of Bone Layer – February 1, 2014

In a seminal post I wrote about half a year ago (Why Growing Taller With Closed Growth Plates Is So Difficult To Figure Out And Impossible To Almost All People), I was talking about why it is close to impossible to stretch out bones to make them longer. Bones are not designed to be easily stretched out. From billions and billions of years of natural evolution, the way that the individual units inside the bones are aligned next to each other means that it would be rather difficult to mold the bones into a certain size or shape. (and yes, we are perfectly aware of Wolff’s Law). The problem is not just one problem, but multiple problems. For a long time, I was not sure how to tackle this problem, since it was a nested layer of problems we have to resolve. The way that the bones are actually structured, with the osteons, lamellar layers, and lacunae of osteoblasts, suggest that it would be very hard with today’s technology to say lengthen the bones or regrow growth plates in any way.

In recent months, we have been inundated with quite a few people who commented and said that we need to search for real solutions to the problem. Move away from talking about the problem and actually search for a real solution. Well, I can only say that we are trying our best with the resources that we have at our disposal at this time.

If you add in the fact that we all have our own lives to live, with other responsibilities, it means that the research is going at a snail’s pace. However, that doesn’t mean that we can’t get and find breakthroughs. So far, I would say that we have found at least half a dozen discoveries which can open more doors and paths for us to look into.

A lot of people have been finding this website through searching for terms like “How to reopen growth plates” on Google. Well, we are not sure that you can using some type of normal pill or chemical reopen those growth plates. A common argument we hear is that there is still a thin line called the epiphyseal growth plate line which stays around and never goes away. Maybe we can do something to turn that line back. Well, from the research Ive done, I suspect that even that epiphyseal line would eventually go away after maybe 10 years after full one maturity. After I had to get an X-Ray on my knee about 4 years ago to check for bone spurs from knee pain, I looked very closed at the X-Ray of my tibia/fibula bone couplet and did not see any trace of even the epiphyseal line.

What I would be willing to propose at this point is a two pronged approach, if not a 3 pronged approach.

1. We first have to use something to change the adult adipocyte stem cells in the yellow bone marrow to start to differentiate into the chondrogenic lineage.

Two PubMed studies I haven’t read over yet suggest that it might be possible, if we keep up with the research for another 3-5 years and then create our own lab to test on ourselves.

2. We than have to figure out how to remove the crystals in the cortical layer of the bone which is the main reason we can’t stretch out the bone. Yes, we realize perfectly that the hydroxyapatite is the main component that gives the long bone the ultra-high compressive strength and the collagen is the main component that gives the long bone the nearly as high tensile strength. I however believe that if we can remove enough calcium crystals, but still keep the collagen, the range of a externally loaded Pressure (force/area) at which the bones can stretch, without causing a major fracture would be lowered. Not only that, the range at which you can use the pressure (as drawn on a stress-strain curve) would be widened. You would be less likely to get a major fracture.

3. The third option I propose is to use a type of high intensity vibration amplifier to get the resonance frequency of the bone, place a sharp edge to the bone, and make micro-fracture cracks on it. The marrow seeps through the cortical bone layer, and turns into cartilage tissue. Of course we have not considered the trabecular bone area at all though, and that could be a big issue.

It might be worth looking over the University of California, Berkeley’s paper “The effect of matrix stiffness on the differentiation of mesenchymal stem cells in response to TGF-Beta“

The Main Issue

Thee main problem (in my opinion) have always been the fact that the bones are just too strong in material strength. They are as strong as stainless steel. I personally think that while the first strategy can be figured out in say 3-5 years, using the right type of electrical stimuli or chemical compound, the 2nd strategy is something that will perplex even the highly trained orthopedic surgeon.

There is the idea of using a series of needles with some type of weak acid (like Apple Cider Vinegar) to slowly diffuse through the skin and react with the calcium crystals of the bone. In theory the calcium crystals are bases and the acid mixed with the bases, mixed with whatever enzyme and catalyst is in the human body, might be able to dissolve the crystals into the blood stream, making a band on the lone bone just weak enough to allow for pulling of the bone.

The last month has been focused on me trying to look up on Google Scholar and Google Patents ideas that people have proposed on how to decalcify or reverse the calcification of bone. I’ve only found mostly quack ideas by people on how to decalcify the pineal gland related to ancient indian medicine, so the search has been elusive.

What I would love to figure out now is what compound is safe enough for us to diffuse into the bone to remove the crystals (aka decalcification of bone layer) and make the bones weaker. Of course, based on how high the material strength is, this idea would not be practical. If a small band on your long bones are weak enough to be stretched out, your body weight pushing down on it due to gravity would shorten it as well. That would be the other problem.

As for My Own Height Increase Progression

I recently spent the half of January in Osaka, Japan for a business trip so there was no way for me to check my height and see whether it has increased. I have been taking the glucosamine sulfate 1000 mg, Vitamin K3, and started to do about 10 minutes of daily stretching so that is fine for now.

I realize now that instead of keeping people on track on the progress of my height increase and whether anything really works, these monthly posts are a good way to tell people thoughts, ideas, and research that I have been getting into. This is good enough for me.

New GTPS System or Grow Taller Pyramid Secrets Review

On Jan 28 we received a message by someone who asked us the question “When are you going to publish your article about GTPS?” – It was by a person who calls themselves calisthenics – There was also another person named Sergi who said the same thing. We are guessing that the two people who sent almost the exact same message is probably the same person. The truth is that we have already in the past reviewed the Grow Taller Guru (Review Here) (aka Lance Ward) and the new system he created called the Grow Taller Pyramid Secrets (The 1st Review is Here). What we sort of figured out about this one person who calls himself the GTG aka the Grow Taller Guru is that the main way he has been marketing and advertising himself is through YouTube, which has become a very good platform to create a unique brand and profile. (You can find his profile link here – https://www.youtube.com/user/TheGrowTallerGuru)

His recent series of video posts have been the new program called Grow Taller Pyramid Secrets. It is also called the VLog or Video Blog or Video Proof Series. He uses the Slogan “GTG (aka Grow Taller Guru) of the UK to the NYC”

Here is the listing of measurements he had done to his students over a 8 week course of exercising, stretching, and diet/nutritional coaching.

Week 1 of Harry & James

Time of Reading – Roughly half past five pm (5:00 PM). First Reading during the daytime – 12:00 Noon

Harry – Shaggy hair, thin, Caucasian. Took off shoes and stood relaxed in front of the stadiometer. Is wearing black & yellow socks. First Reading – Almost exactly 68 inches (5′ 8”) or around 172.6 cms tall.
James – Short clean cut hair w/ Glasses, slightly taller, very pale, thin. Also in socks. Measured reading – Exactly 182 cm in height

Week 11 Measurements

Local Time- 4:49 UK Time

Harry Measured Height – 174 -174.1 cm – Posture is slightly more rigid, with hands out to the side
James Measurement – 183.9 cm – Posture is much more upright this time, puffed up chest

Week 20 Measurements

Time – 12:40 on Sept 8^th, (assuming year is 2013) – (also assuming local UK time)

Harry Measured Height – 174.6 cm
James Measured Height – 185.4-185.5 – posture is more relaxed with chest not puffed out as much.

Week 30 Measurements

Time – Sunday 12:42 on Nov 17^th, 2013

Harry Measured Height – 175. 8 cm
James Measured Height – 185.6 cm

Week 40 Measurement

Time is 12:15 for Saturday, 25^th of January

Harry Measured height – 178.4-178.5 cm
James Measured Height – 185.4-185.5 cm

Other things to mention about the videos that were sent.

The guy is selling Ayurvedic Urea which is supposed to be $550/bottle for free. He is giving away a free height chart. In the background is a picture of Sultan Kosen who was at the time still around 8′ 1″.

Our Analysis On The Height Increase Measured

We had previously tried to explain why one of his clients managed to increase his height by upwards of around 3 cm over a 1 year time span. (Read that review Here). The client was named Michael from Singapore. He originally measured at 8 AM at 161.6 cm on Day 1 to 164.3 & 164.4 on Days 260 and Day 300 respectively. In that past post we had only speculated that the height gain from Lance Ward’s exercise program was real, but only for a certain specific range of person. We had guessed that due to Michael’s previous lifestyle of poor eating habits and lack of exercise, his posture was slouching. Once Michael learned to improve his behavior, his posture improved. His overall increase in 3 cm over a 1 year time is completely reasonable, which could be completely explained from vertebral decompression.

There was a guy on YouTube last year called TightSkinFlash who also through daily stretches gained about 4 cms in height. We did a review on him on the post “Reviewing A Height Increase Success Story By SkinTightFlash From Youtube, A Lance Ward Supporter“

However that reasoning can’t be used for the cases here, because of Harry.

Where James, who is the taller of the students increased by 3.5 cms, Harry, the shorter of the two, really increased his height beyond would should be possible. I think that the primary focus on our analysis should be on Harry, who grew past the range of what could be considered just stretching and disc or spinal decompression.

If we analyzed the videos of Harry of when the videos were started and around the end at 40 weeks, if we looked really closely, we should see that there has been a definite increase in height and change. If we took the height of Lance as the standard, assuming that he did not change in height, (also assuming that his footwear did not change in thickness) then we can see that the top of Harry’s head has increased relative to the position of Lance’s head.

Notice how in the first pictures, which we clipped from the 1st video (for Day #1) the top of Harry’s head is around the level of Lance’s mouth/lips level. By the end of the video series, the top of his head has reached the position of Lance’s Nose position. Of course all of the pictures we clipped is from the video series from the GTG Youtube Channel. The pictures are indeed grainy and the angles have changed, but I have personally tried my best to get the two pictures of the two measurements and positions to be as similar as possible. Harry has definitely increased in height from one picture to the other, at least by our judgement.

We can only propose some ideas which can never be validated or discredited, at least without real contact with Lance himself.

Here is a list of our explanations.

The most scientific reason is from jut looking at the body shape of Harry. Notice how skinny both of the students are compared to Lance.

Something that is not well known except among people who study bone growth and auxology is that adolescents and kids who still have growth plates grow vertically first, than followed by horizontally. The long bones in a person’s body first gets longer. Once the growth plates disappear, the bones then get thicker, due to periosteal bone cell growth.

If anyone would look at the relative wrist size of say their father, compared to his son, they would notice that almost always the wrist of the father, who might be shorter than his son, is thicker.

Bones get thicker and wider due to bone growth in the radial direction, as opposed to he axial direction when the hyaline cartilage was still separation the primary ossification center and the secondary ossification center. Once a male reaches full bone maturity, they actually start to grow wider, which is what NBA scouts would describe as to very long & skinny NBA prospects body to “fill out”. The difference between a male body in high school and adulthood is very different, even though they might be the same height.

The adult male body increases in muscle density and content. In fact, the muscle density on a male is highest when he is around the 25-35 year range.

From understanding the linear mechanics on how the growth progression of bones go, we can say that due to how skinny the male students are, they have not ‘filled out” yet, suggesting that they have not reached the end of their bone maturity.

Remember also the fact that there is more than just growth plates in the long bones. The irregular vertebrate bones also have a few layers of hyaline cartilage. While the legs and arms may not be getting longer & contributing to the overall height, we should not forget that the torso makes a major contribution to. If we assume that even 5 of the 33 vertebrate bones have a slight layer of cartilage left, they would lead to some extra height.

Based on our previous research to see how do growth plates actually disappear, we’ve found that the growth plates don’t ossify at the same time. While the hyaline cartilage in the distal tibia fuses the earliest, around 16-18, the cartilage in the vertebrate bones might not fuse until 20-22.

That is what I propose are the list of explanations for Harry’s height increase.

He has not reached the real age for bone maturity. This is because of his skinny body shape. We suggest asking Harry whether he has hair on his legs.
He may be 18 years old when he started on the testing. However, about 10-25% of the male population have some working growth plate cartilage left which lets them continue to grow.
His height is attributed to vertebrate cartilage which does not ossify until the ages of 20-22. Read our older post “Your Growth Plate X-Rays Don’t Tell The Entire Story, Why Your Doctor Can Be Wrong And You Might Still Be Growing 🙂“

This is all of course assuming that the students are not wearing any type of height increasing socks (we did a report on these unique products which give you a full 1 inch of extra height here), have not reduced the stadiometer, or done any other type of trick as a setup beforehand.

As a person who used to perform sleight of hand tricks and practiced to be an illusionist for a few years, who understands how to trick (and/or misdirect) people through stage setups, preparations, and even using shills, I understand the need to be very sceptical and suspicious of people who make very extreme and extravagant claims. I am willing to believe that Lance might have helped these two British lads increase their height, but would their bodies have gone through the same amount of growth, without his help? That would of course require something very experimental unbiased.

I am not sure where we would be able to do some type of double-blind non-biased test using identical twins for real testing. At this point, the only thing we can do is to take his word on faith while be slightly reserved at the same time.

Biggest Growth Spurt of 24 inches In 3 Months by 12 Year Old Boy from Hodgkin’s Chemotherapy Treatment

Recently I have been reading the Pulitzer Prize Winner book on the history of cancer called “The Emperor of All Maladies” by Siddhartha Mukherjee. My cousin which has been trained as an oncologist recommend the book to me and I finally managed to buy the Audible.com version of the book from Amazon and have been spending about hours in the last few days of traveling in Airports and Planes listening to this incredible story on how physicians for the last few millennia have been fighting against this most difficult of diseases.

Some surprising figures I would learn is that 1 out of every 3 people in the USA would be diagnosed with cancer at some point in their life. Every year about 3 million people die from the disease in the world but the CDC reports that it is probably closer to 8 million people die from some version of Cancer each year. The struggle of doctors to fight and try to win this war against cancer is probably going be the defining medical endeavor for our generation, if not this century.

Maybe during the 19^th century and the early 20^th century, the focus of physicians was on finding ways to fight against infectious diseases like TB, Smallpox, Polio, and Influenza, those type of diseases caused by the bacteria or parasites have been taken care of ever since the advent of Penicillin and various other vaccinations. The defining types of disorders that are affecting this new generation is going to be degenerative diseases as man kind learn how to extend his life expectancy from 65 to maybe to double that. Our great-grandparents didn’t have to worry about Osteoporosis, Arthritis, High Blood Pressure, or Alzeheimers as much as us since their life expectancy was not as long as ours will be. Cancer will be the other major type of disease which we will have to deal with.

Our Main Point

In a certain passage of the audible book Dr. Mukherjee mentioned that after one case of cancer remission for a boy which had his weight reduced greatly to just 50 lbs by cancer, the 12 year old boy managed to grow 2 feet within 3 months after the oncologists managed to find the right type of chemical compound, (usually a type of anti-folate derivative) to stall the multiplication and spread of the cancer cells in his system. In addition, His weight increased by 50%, which does not seem like a lot since a 50% increase from 50 lbs is just 25 lbs to a total of 75 lbs.

(Read the clipping we did of the PDF of the audio book on the right. It was under the chapter called “An Army On The March“)

This type of story is the strangest which I have ever heard of any growth spurts. It is definitely the biggest growth spurt which I have ever heard off. To grow 2 feet in 3 months would mean that the kid would be growing at around over 1/4 inch every single day!!!

Of course we have to remind ourselves that this is a 12 year old boy we are talking about but this rate is still insane to comprehend.

I am not sure how it is possible that a person can grow that fast, even if we take into account catch up growth. I personally would suspect that after his 3 months of intense height increase, the growth plates probably completely ossified, due to over extension of the process in the cartilage.

(It seems that the growth plates, just like almost every other system/unit in the body that has not been infected by cancer has a natural negative feedback loop controller if one variable becomes too high. This is known collectively as Homeostasis. If you over exert the growth plates, they will go through bone maturity at a faster rate. If your growth is stunted, the senescence of the growth plates actually slows down, leading to catch-up growth after the inhibitory effect is removed. It seems that maybe the chondrocytes in the resting zone have some type of internal, intrinsic rate at which they can replicate and enlarge before some receptor or protein in the ECM causes them to stop.)

We have written before a few times about how catch up growth works.

While we were studying the longitudinal diurnal growth patterns of the tibia, we found that the long bones don’t grow in any type of linear pattern, or even predictable variable and/or intermittent pattern. (For Reference, read “Modulation of vertebral and tibial growth by compression loading: diurnal versus full-time loading“). They go through what can only be described as micro-growth spurts which were irregular . We realized from looking at the pattern on how major growth spurts work, there are certain short durations of time where the hypertrophy process of the chondrocytes seem to go crazy.

The Possible Case and the Growth Curve

What we speculate, without going into the deep research to find the exact case, is that based on the growth curve provided by the pamphlets created annually by WHO (World Health Organization) and the NIH (National Institute of Health) that before the treatment, the boy would probably have been around 3 feet tall. Let’s remember what we learned from previous posts before where we both uploaded and analyzed the charts provided by both the CDC and the WHO.

The average (median, NOT mean) American 12 year old boy would be around 150 cm tall with a 1 standard deviation range of 7-8 cm. The information was obtained by typing in the term “Average Height of 12 Year Old Boy” into the Wolfram Alpha Search Engine. (Based on the 2000 CDC Report).

In addition, the average weight (we are again talking about median) would be 40 kg, with an uneven distribution bell curve. It would range as high as 50 kg or as low as 34 kg.

We assume that the boy did not have Hodgkin’s his whole life, but only developed it probably in the last 2-3 years. That meant that his growth would have been stunted only within the last 3-5 years, although there might have been a few cancer cells in his system before that. From what I can personally remember about this particular type of cancer, which is usually called Lymphoma, it is one of the few cancers which is not too fatal and people who get it treated early enough can have a very high life expectancy past diagnosis.

Since the growth rate per year for an American boy between the ages of say 7-12 or 9-12 is about 2-3 inch/year and also correct that for the factor that increased bump in linear growth in long bones for puberty, we would guess that his height around the age of 12 was stunted by around 10-13 inches of height. Obviously the body was trying to catch up.

If this boy did not have his height stunted, the 2 extra feet of height would have pushed him to be almost 7 feet tall. If we we assume that this boy at the age of 12 was about the 12-13 inches shorter than average, which is at 150 cm (or 4′ 11″), than his increase of 2 feet would put his final height to be around 6 feet tall. Of course, that would still seem a little ridiculous. It is hard for us to imagine a 12 and a half year old boy who has been suffering for a few years from Hodgkin’s growing to the height of 6 feet tall. We probably won’t be provided private information about that boy who lived in the early 20th Century, but we guess that if we are to assume that his height was dramatically stunted to less than 4 feet, then his growth to a final adult height (assuming the boy lived to adulthood) would not seem so extreme.

The case of this boy who at the age of 12 with stunted growth growing 24 inches in height in 3 months shows that the potential for increased bone longitudinal growth is much higher than I would have ever predicted. Could we possibly use a mechanism to stunt our growth at the later stages of bone maturity (ages 16-18) for an extra push in bone longitudinal growth to reach a higher adult height from the rebounding effect of catch-up growth?

Reply To Geoffrey Arnold and His Blog The Social Complex

We have a tracking program for our website Natural Height Growth and can see most people who quote or link to the website. We found out from the tracking software that Mr. Arnold wrote on a Reddit thread that we on this website were selling a product so we had to be some type of major scam. We are not selling anything of our own, at least right now.

This is what Geoffrey Arnold has said about us, which we found insulting and rude, since he didn’t even give us a chance and look over what we have been doing for the last few years. Maybe the only way to describe this guy is to call him a “Hater”. He feels like he can’t play in the game since the world is discriminating against him and people of his “kind” unfairly so the only way he know how to respond is just to hate and write.

The back story, on what Geoffrey wrote on the specific Reddit Post…

“….This guy actually sent a message to my blog, advertising his site, as if I was going to publish it. I might get around to reading it later, but I’m sure it’s mostly gibberish. Hard to trust anyone who is talking about heightism while selling a product aimed at people who want to be taller.

That would be like getting information about racism from a company that sells skin bleaching cream…”

The clipping is from below…

Our intention was to write two different books, one for people who are still growing and another for people who have stopped growing. At this point, we have looked at the science and say that it is possible for us to write one book for people who still have their growth plate cartilage and can possibly stlll grow. We can’t write the 2nd book for people with no cartilage left. We may never be able to write that 2nd book since we have found very little evidence that it would be possible.

There is a store section on the website but if he had look at it carefully, then he would see we don’t have anything of our own to sell. As for everything else, we give them for free. We even had DMCAs from the people at (Company That Will Not Be Named) and GT4I given to stop us from giving their products for free. We are putting our skin into the game and have come close to legal actions against people because we are trying to make the internet and the world a better place. We are trying to change the way the world operations in a fundamental way.

What don’t think that his work is that impressive. He has said that he has written over 1200+ post for the website. We are now at over 1100+. In terms of quantity, we will overwhelm his website soon.

He would have realized that our motives are not just a financial one. We’d love to actually find a solution and make some big profit from it but we keep the site going from google ads. We are a part of the Amazon Affiliate program but that doesn’t earn enough money since people don’t seem to click those links. This website is not as profitable as most people would believe. We are trying to build up a way to monetize the website to let us continue to pay off the monthly operating costs.

I wrote to him before because I thought he cared enough to want to help and maybe try to look for a solution. He sure has a lot of stuff written about heightism. Everything he says is more or less right, but would he would be willing to put in some type of effort to maybe change the system, and help people? If he doesn’t believe there is a solution, that is fine. He doesn’t need to lift up a medical textbook and go through the real research to see what is possible. He has the complete right to just spend the next 10+ years and keep writing another 3000+ posts about how the world is bias towards short men and short people.

He’ll get a small following of people on Reddit who agree with him and he will probably will get some type of self satisfaction in knowing that he can only be half-fulfilled. He can justify his own existence in his small circle of influence and control. We get it, the way that the ego works to protect itself is to just be right about something. We might not be able to get what we really, REALLY want, but as long as we can sit back, be pessimistic, sceptical, cynical, or pragmatic about how bad the world treats us because of something which we can’t change, as least we can be partially fulfilled and satisfied. Instead of finding self-esteem in knowing that we can change this problem, he finds validation in his ego from knowing that he is “right” since he just talk about how bad the world is. He can be the sceptic who does nothing, but takes no time or effort to look for a way out of the problems that they vent about.

What he wrote about us I would consider to be unfair since he never made the full effort to read any of our large posts and research extensively. He brushed us off without ever looking at the science. Why? It is the same reason why I have brushed off any type of height increasing pill or potion or herbal concoction sold by websites using the type of design from the 2004-2009 era. It seems to be too crazy and improbably to believe. However, at least I spend the time to look over what the websites have to say. Maybe they do have something of worth to say and something to contribute. He apparently did not take the time to look over what our research is, and dismissed us without ever looking into our content.

Heightism is Not a Social Construct but an Irrepressible Bias Based on Natural Instinct

I am probably going to be tarred and feather for this claim by certain people but I will make just one claim which is this, the socio-anthropological term “heightism” is not a social construct but an irrepressible bias based on natural instinct.

This claim I am making would go directly against many people who might be below average in height of the overall group that they are in. To defend their own self image of their worth as a human being, they would obviously reject that concept and counterclaim that heightism is a social construct.

I was recently looking at the website traffic that is coming to this website and noticed that a few Reddit threads were linking back to this website. It seems that some people in the Short category were using a few older posts to validate some point they were trying to make about the science of height and growth. It is something that is created by the individuals of a specific culture to be biased against and ridicule the shorter individuals of the society, most specifically the male members. I had to disagree. (The thread was titled “Heightism and Height Scams“)

One person who commented made the exact quote that heightism is a social construct. That person calls himself Goefrrey. Only recently did I found out about the 1000+ post tumbler website started by a him (Geoffrey Arnold). He wrote two short pieces called “Is Height Discrimination Natural?” and “Heightism is a Social Construct based in Gender Norms”

Why I think Heightism is an Unconscious Natural Instinct

If heightism was indeed some type of social construct, wouldn’t it then be a social phenomena that is prevalent in only certain countries and cultures. So far I have not met one single culture or society which had the opposite opinion, which is that the smaller percentage people of a society is better looking. Can you name one culture that does that?

If 99% of the people in a culture believes in something, doesn’t that sort of imply that it might be real? Of course, we could counter that argument with the curious case of North Korea. It is believed that maybe 98-99% of all the people in North Korea believes that Kim Il Sung is a real god and their national hero which they go crazy for. If 99% of the people in that small nation and society believes that he is (or was) a type of deity, does that mean that he is a god? They have no connection to the other countries outside of it. They don’t know better. Based on lack of knowledge which is the result of bad luck in the genetic lottery for being born in the country of North Korea and its regime in the last 60 years, the political state and the person desires of one despotic dictator might have the power to override even some basic natural laws. Maybe the late Kim Jong Il might have some ability to remove the thinking of almost everyone in his society. Maybe at some point due to his own inferior complex of short height, he made some crazy decree that smaller height people (around his height of probably 5′ 2″ ) was the best height. To align the malnutrition problem and stunted growth problem with national pride, he just might have the ability to convert the majority’s peoples mind to believe that being shorter is better than being taller.

We are aware of the other Communist Regimen, of the People’s Republic of China. For about 10-20 years during national zealot on the need to establish equality for all people, there was a time when being too tall was considered a bad thing. If you were taller than your peers, it was an indication that maybe you were trying to show off to other people even when you are not trying to. Based on communist principles of requiring everyone to be more or less equal, naturally growing up taller would have been frowned upon.

Then again, I think at this point we can say that the natural tendency of human beings is to shift towards capitalist societies, not communist societies. Throughout history, there has always been inequality of some form or another. The most blatant example of inequality is economic inequality. Over time, there will always be a few people in the minority which have the right combination of intelligence, drive, worth ethic, and luck to push them to the higher echelon of their respective societies.

Due to the way that human societies over time are almost guaranteed to drift into a society of divided classes with capitalism working its invisible hand (as stated by Adam Smith in his Wealth of Nations book), and also based on the human will to strive, succeed, and become greedy, as well as to hoard their wealth and not wanting to share the wealth they had accumulated over the years of hard work with other people who chose not to put in as much effort or was lazy, it would make sense that the communistic ideal would never work. It is unnatural.

Only communist societies would ever try to negate and reprogram a human to believe that taller is not better. Of course we have sort of proved based on the negative, non-altruistic tendencies in the dark recesses of the human psyche, that communism can never work in the long run since they run counter to what we are naturally responsive to. That means that left on its own to make up its own judgements and thoughts about how the world and nature works, the human mind to go back to its default embedded programming from over million years of evolution, the majority of every society will believe that being taller is better than being shorter (if of course you manage to hold all the other factors and parameter in the system you are analyzing constant)

The Case Based on The Distribution & Prevalence of Heightism

Heightism is more than just an American (USA), Canadian, Australian, or European social convention. In my own travels throughout the Western Modern world and then traveling to the countries to the East, Asia, Japan, South Korea, and China, every single nation and culture seems to prize tall stature and believe that taller people are better looking. Give a survey to 100 young females on what the height standard they would want in a male partner and probably 90-95% of them would want the male companion to be in the taller group from simple classifications and categorizations.

I have written at least 3-4 post before showing just how much effort people of these East Asian countries are putting to make themselves taller or trying to make their own children slightly taller. We might be tempted to ask whether something like height is something worth putting so much of their mental energy and effort. We could argue that unlike suffering some type of medical disorder which might inflict great pain through the body, being not as tall we other people would not cause any type of real physical pain to the individual.

Based on the competitiveness of the world, and how many people are in this world, it is almost a sort of given that people are going to want to express their own individuality and uniqueness by comparing themselves to others to find something about themselves which sets them apart from others in a positive way. One of the easiest ways to show that one is (supposedly) intrinsically better than another person is comparing whose top of the head is further away from the level ground which they both stand on. Remember that no matter where we go on this planet, there is a downward force called gravity pushing every single cell in our body downwards. Our measured height is a way for the individual organism to pronounce their rejection in being pushed down into the dirt/ground by this most fundamental of universal forces.

It might be argued that the anthropometric measurement is sort of arbitrary and that measuring the top of one’s head (or cranial bone) to the feet is a very strange human derived concept. Maybe height is just a word we use to describe a measurement that doesn’t really translate into any type of real benefit for any average person living their life. If both of the people use the same measuring stick or standard, then a comparison of two human beings can be done. However, we have seen already that stunted growth is a result of some illness or disorder. Whereas there are hundreds of different types of diseases that can cause the person to become shorter and develop stunted growth, there is a very few diseases that makes a person become taller than average or develop an accelerated rate of growth. Most anthropologists with ecologists have agreed that the best indicator of a country’s overall health is from looking at their average height. Apparently the height of a country is a very good indicator on the overall health of the people living there. This shows that increased height does have a real correlation to an increase in the increase of the quality of life, as least for a nation overall. The people living in Sweden have a better quality of life than the people of say China and is obvious from looking at the height differences in the two countries.

We as a species realize that a lot of our emotional and mental energy and suffering is caused from constantly comparing ourselves to other people. Being tall or rich or beautiful is a concept that is based on relativity. Being 6 feet tall in India is big but in Norway it is just average. Making $100,000 a year in the Philippines makes you rich but to do that in Singapore makes you vey average. However, we hope that the reader understands the principle of relativity. The unique way that people judge their own place in the world is not based on absolute standards, but relative standards which can change (increase and decrease) over time.

This is not just some type of American and East Asian phenomena. The largest demographic to this website is from the countries of India and Philippines. I get bombarded by messages everyday from hundreds of young Indian and Filipino teenagers asking me how to help become taller. One of the most popular posts I have ever written which has gotten the most comments and shares was the review on the Gloxi Height Enhancer Drink (Read the review here). Gloxi has been something that has been advertised on TV in the Philippines as a height increase drink for years but the local Filipinos don’t realize that the drink is made in Taiwan. I found it absolutely despicable that people of one Asian countries would manufacture an obviously useless drink to another Asian country to take advantage of their ethnic features. Probably some guy in East Asia realized that the people in Southeast Asia were of a shorter height than them and were not internet savy yet so they used the people’s ignorance of science to get them to buy strange drinks which promises a dream which can never come true. It seems that this belief in tall stature being better is a social phenomena that is experience throughout the entire continent of Asia.

So what about africa? I am reminded of the genocide that happened in Rwanda between the Hutus and the Tutsis. It seems that the two different groups of ethnicities which lived in the same geopolitical state which we call a country or nation were of a bipolar distribution of heights. The Hutus were the majority and the Tutsi were the minority. They spoke the same language and lived next to each other. The only difference were in the body sizes. From the BBC News article I quote the following “…Tutsis are often taller and thinner than Hutus, with some saying their origins lie in Ethiopia”. Apparently when the Belgians first came over for colonialism, they decided to classify the ethnic tribes. By some default reasons, they just decided to say that the Tutsis were the better of the two ethnicities, with no real reason except that they were taller in body size. Obviously that Tutsis were happy with it and they got many different economic privileges for decades until the Hutus became very resentful of the differences. The picture to the right was found from the blog post “The Hutu’s and the Tutsi’s and Belgium Stereotyping“. It seems that even in Africa the belief in taller people being somehow better is also present, although we are fully aware that it was the Belgians who were the original judges on which tribes were deemed by default to be better or more attractive.

How about South America? Again, let’s look at the viewpoints of the natives which lived there before outside influences. The most obvious example is of the legendary white-skinned cloud people called the Chachapoyas. (source). For centuries these people were neighbors to the Incans and the Incans admired them for their tall stature and light skin color.

Quoted below…

“The women of the Chachapoya were much prized by the Incas as they were tall and fair skinned. The Chronicler Pedro Cieza de León offers wrote of the Chachapoyas. “They are the whitest and most handsome of all the people that I have seen in Indies, and their wives were so beautiful that because of their gentleness, many of them deserved to be the Incas’ wives and to also be taken to the Sun Temple.”

While I am not going to debate where humans also have some type of natural affinity for lighter skin color and have always thought that lighter skin is more attractive (That is a discussion for other types of websites), I have no doubt that the feature of being of tall stature of this particular tribe in the native South America is something that that shorter Incans admired greatly. So even in native tribes in South American before any type of European Influence, the local also thought that tall stature is something that is admired.

My Main Point

This bias or unconscious preference to project a more positive image on taller people in 99.9% of all cultures and societies in the world shows that that it is NOT something that was programmed into us by our parents or teachers in grade school.

I don’t think we can un-program or overwrite this type of programming, because it is part of our reptilian brain system. It is unconscious, it is natural, it is something that would be extremely hard to reprogram. I liken this situation to the metaphor of computer software and hardware. Whereas culture is like the software which you can change and rewrite by changing source code of a program, the hardware is something you can’t do without taking a manual, hands on approach through real manipulation using mechanical manipulation. If we treat the brain as the computer, then the software is the ideas, believes, and values in a person. We can over time change that part. The actual anatomy and physiology of the brain is the hardware. There is no way that we can use software (ie hypnosis) to change the hardware. We can change the location of the medulla using positive affirmations. To change the actual brain, you would need surgery tools to cut and saw before moving the physical parts and components around.

Obviously, this preference may be based on natural laws, but it is not a real law as defined by science. In Science actually there is almost no “Laws” per se, but theories. Just like Darwin’s Theory of Evolution and Newton’s Theory of Gravity and Eintein’s Theory of Relativity, it is very hard for scientists to claim anything to be a real law. Off of the top of my head, I know of only two real scientific laws, which are actually related to each other. They are the 1st law of thermodynamics, and the 2nd law of thermodynamics. The first law states that energy can never be lost or increase, but only changed between different types. The second one says that the entropy or disorder in a the examined system will only increase over time. Those are laws. This claim I make is that the height preference is a natural law, like the natural law of sexuality. If you were going to make a bet, 95-99%% of the time, you would be right about going with the taller person since everyone else would agree based on some natural instinctual embedded programming.

Analogously, we can say that this natural law for humans to almost always lean towards the taller people in any group is a very good rule of thumb which is similar to sexuality. You are not going to have a society which is 100% heterosexual. There is always going to be a minority of people who are homosexual, which can not be changed but based on rules of statistical probability. Straight people however will always make up the majority of a culture, around 95% or face extinction from a lack of mating and reproduction. Similarly, we can say the same thing about people’s preferences towards stature. Maybe there might be 2-4% of any society which actually prefers shorter statured individuals, but the majority, and a very large majority of the people will always choose the individuals in the group which are taller than average.

The best example is using height or size to talk about different types of living beings. Centuries ago the Greeks would describe their gods as being of immense sizes. Beyond the greek gods, there were Titans. Titans were of gigantic sizes and because of their size alone, they were given through mental projection immense strength, with so much power that they could compete with the gods.

Humans do not create gods to worship who are described as 6 inch tall dolls. When we talk about greater and more powerful beings, we almost always say that they are of immense height and size. We unconscious give the gods we make up in our head great height and size so that we can worship them. Would we really bow down to a god which appeared and was 6 inches tall? Would we still be afraid of an extraterrestrial species after first contact if they turned out to be just 2 feet in height?

Size is not everything, but it does mean a lot. For most humans size did mean a whole lot. Let’s stop lying to ourselves and say that heightism is a social construct. It is not.

I have still not found one society which believes that the shorter individuals are better than the taller ones.

The following excerpts I have italicized to indicate that they are quotes from other people on the thread board. (The other thread the following lines are taken from are at “MMT leg lengthening forum admin Apotheosis exposed and caught deceiving forum members…“)

“…All the more to me because I’ve decided on the surgery. Now this is something I can’t believe. I seem to have lost trust in humanity. The humanity that made me feel inferior because I’m short, the humanity that tries to take advantage of that in so base a way…”

“…western society as it stand right now just doesn’t like short men. We can argue until we are blue in the face about confidence and having a great self image and improving what we can change but it doesn’t stop the stigma thats going to be there. Of course this doesn’t mean you crawl into a hole and die…”

“…The problem is completely social…”

If I was to try to summarize all these thoughts that they are putting down, what these person are trying to say is sort of this type of mental viewpoint on the world.

“…the world is out to get me. In some way, maybe over the centuries of selective indoctrination of the country/culture I was born/grew up into, most of the people in my group/society have made up some type of institutionalized bias against me and people of my kind and they are all in some way (maybe not knowingly) working to put me down so that I would crater to the social pressure and develop a bad self image of myself…. Well I am going to be stubborn and resist it since I know that I am at least smarter than them. They are stupid and ignorant, I am not”.

So they make everything about themselves, and how they are being punished and being short changed in the world. They talk about how unfair it is that they have been inflicted with some type of feature that they have no control over and can’t do anything about.

Maybe also in the back of their mind somewhere they think that because they had a very tough and mentally scarring childhood from school bullies and being lonely with no friends or lack of relationship experience, they have somehow “had it worse” than other people. Because of their increased exposure to pain and suffering, that somehow automatically translates to mean that they are somehow a tougher person or stronger person than another person who didn’t have to go through what they had to go through. They think that the world is out to get them.

The truth is that most people are NOT out to get them just because they might be shorter than average. Only a small minority of people in the world ever care enough to even say hi, much less make the effort to do something to you. The truth is that most people just don’t care about the individual, or the phenomena a person might be so passionate about.

I remember a very revealing lengthy poetic quote along the lines of …

“When I was younger I was always worried about what other people thought about me.
When I got older I decided to do my own thing and stopped caring about what other people thought about me.
Now that I am close to the end of my life, I finally realize now that all that time, nobody was thinking about me. They were too busy thinking about about themselves. They were worrying about what other people thought about them”

The 2nd thing that we need to do is to accept the way that the world, the universe, nature, reality, or existence really operate. Most of us are fully aware that the world is not flat and that the Earth is NOT at the center of the universe. We are not special or our species is not that species. We can no longer stay ignorant because we have already drank from the cup of knowledge. We can;t go back and pretend that we can make up childhood stories and fantasies on how we wish the world would operate. It just doesn’t happen that way.

Instead of writing 10,000+ word discussion post on online threads on Reddit and support groups discussing the philosophical, social, or psychological ramifications of what it means to be shorter than average in one’s society, let’s just swallow this hard pill and do something else with our lives.

Instead of venting, and complaining about how the world is unfair and forcing you to play this game we call life at some obvious disadvantage, we should just take action and try to do something about it. You can save your money to get limb lengthening surgery to make yourselves 3-4 inches taller. If you want 2 feet of increased height, then go in for 5 consecutive surgeries. Those things will hurt a lot and take about 1 year each to do as well as $50-$100,000 each but I know plenty of people who became millionaires in their early 20s and retired. There are people who are short, but they have the resources to change their bodies if they really wanted it bad enough. If you wanted something bad enough, even to become taller, you can get it. You just have to be willing to pay the price for achieving your intended goals. It is just that for our specific purposes, the price we have to pay even for 2-3 inches of extra height can be quite high.

I decided to take a full year and a half out of my life to try to do something about it. This website is my work and effort in creating a resource for people to read and give them a real, decent in finding some type of solution. Sure, maybe at the very end of all of our research and studies we find NOTHING, but that is sort of like life. In the end we all have to die and be pushed in the nothingness and complete emptiness of death eventually. Eventually all of our efforts and work is in vain. We are lost in time and history as people generations from now forget who we were and our gravestone is covered over to make construction for new buildings. In the time we do have on this planet and living this life, let’s try to do something cool.

The video below is the famous speech that Rocky gave to his son in the 6th Rocky movie.

The Issue Over Cognitive Dissonance, Self Rationalization, and Ego Protection

I don’t know anyone who has not let their ego become their master the majority of the time. Our ego is what we are often protecting when we get into any type of argument or fight with another person. I say that we should stop with protecting our ego and just stop fighting the way that the world really works. We can try to write another 10,000 posts trying to argue our point, but that is not going to change anyone’s mind. The best we could do is that maybe after they finish reading our posts, they take 2-3 minutes to stop doing what they intended to do and just think about the implications of what we said.

What I would ask everyone to do is just stop bullshitting themselves, drop the ego for just this once, and just look at the world as it really is. We need to stop all the mental masturbation being done on threads on internet forums. We need to stop trying to use cognitive dissonance and justifications and rationalizations to protect our egos. Accept that height is important, and sometimes that is all that is needed.